Photography & Photoblogs

People react in all sorts of ways when they learn that their spouse has cancer. They cry. They hunker down to fight the illness. They get a renewed appreciation for life. They get depressed or empathetic or optimistic or angry (or all four at once). They panic, or expend great effort trying not to. They revolve to learn all they can about the illness. Eventually, they may become driven to become oncologists or to volunteer in hospitals or to donate to research projects.

Bob Carey surely had some of those reactions when his wife, Linda, was diagnosed with breast cancer. And to those he added another, more unusual, impulse: He wanted to photograph himself topless — in a pink tutu.

Spot Cool Stuff loves websites that are both simple and ingenious. On Tumblr, perhaps no blog exemplifies those two characteristics more than FILMography. The site features photos of hands holding — other photos. The photo being held is a black and white screenshot of a scene from a movie. And the place that photo is held is the exact spot that movie scene was shot from!

The end result: a cool overlay of a movie scene with its real life location.

Now, from some creative folks at the BBC, comes Mugshot Yourself, a website that can turn a portrait into a mugshot. And not just any mugshot, but an old timey mugshot, the sort of sepia Wanted poster picture seen in so many silent movies.

Everyone has had awkward family moments (and many of us still do). Not everyone has had their awkward family moments photographed, posted online, published in a book and mocked in a board game. You’ll find the lucky (or unlucky) few who have on the humorous website Awkward Family Photos.

Professional and semi-professional camera equipment can be expensive. Really expensive. Potentially the-equivalent-of-buying-a-car expensive. For photography enthusiasts who can’t afford high-end camera gear—or are leery about making the financial plunge for it—there’s a cool website that will let you rent cameras, lenses, lighting another photography accessories: Borrow Lenses.

The number of suberb photostreams—collections of photographs published by a single user—on Flickr easily stretches into the hundreds. Here’s a look at eight that, for whatever reason, grabbed our fancy today:

Yann Arthus-Bertrand might be the coolest photographer on the planet. Or, as is more often the case, ABOVE the planet.

There are an enormous number of blogs dedicated to sharing, and discussing, photographs. Many are, um, shall we say “less than interesting.” However, the photography on a surprising number of blogs are quite good. And on a few it is excellent.

Time was that a person on a vacation would send friends and family these things called “postcards.” A “postal service” would physically carry said card from the sender’s location to the addressee’s provided that the postcard had affixed upon it a proof of delivery service payment (or “stamp”). One side of the postcard would have a short message, the other side a photo of people the sender has never met or a vista the sender has probably not seen.

Today, people travel with digital cameras and email photos of their trip to their friends and family. This method is a lot faster. But something has been lost in not getting that physical postcard.